


Dream a Little Dream

by MrProphet



Series: Dreamcatcher [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 15:11:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10744239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Dream a Little Dream

Sam was sitting on a blanket, the warm wind in her hair and the scent of salt water in her nostrils. A man lay at her side, but she was working hard at ignoring him just at the moment. Once upon a time she had not done so, but that was a long time ago; longer than could be counted in mere years.

"Who is he?"

Sam looked up as a girl strolled across the dunes towards her. She was a pretty young girl, with blonde hair and green eyes, and she wore an old-fashioned white dress.

"No-one important," Sam replied.

Michelle tilted her head on one side. "Jonas Hanson," she said. "But he's not what's important about this place. This is a happy place in spite of him, not because of him." She sat down on the blanket beside Sam. "It's nice."

"How did you know about Jonas?"

"Because you're a puzzle-person, and I can read puzzle-people. I've got a message for the real you," Michelle went on. "I'm ready to play with her again; you tell her that."

"I don't want to play."

"I don't want to play with _you_ ; I want to play with the real Sam. Her games were fun, especially when we went toe to toe. So I'm going to find her games and play them again, until she comes out to play with me herself. Cassidy says if I do that, she won't be able to resist coming to play herself."

"No! You can't do that, Michelle. It's not right!" Sam looked around for a weapon.

"I'm not here for you," Michelle repeated. "You're just a messenger." She stood up and dusted off her dress. "This really is a nice place, Sam. Toodle-oo."

"No, Michelle. Wait!"

 

Sam woke up, still crying out: "Wait!"

*

_Stargate Command,  
Twenty minutes later_

Sam was all-but hopping up and down while she waited for General Hammond's aide to usher her into the General's office. Hammond picked up on her anxiety at once.

"Major Carter?" he asked, then waited in silence for her to explain.

"Michelle is back," Sam explained. "I've tried to contact Colonel O'Neill twice already; Teal'c and Jonas are still trying, but I'd wager that the Colonel is already trapped in a cyclic dream."

"What can we do?" Hammond asked.

"I don't know," Sam admitted. "We should send someone to check on the Colonel, prepare the infirmary to support anyone who falls under Michelle's influence and have the Tok'ra memory devices sent from Area 51 to monitor their dreams. In the meantime we should contact the Asgard and ask to borrow Gersemi again; we may need her to help track Michelle's location. The Asgard have been busy with their own problems lately, of course, so we might need to run this one down on our own."

"I hate to admit it," Hammond said, "but for that we'll probably need the NID. Our Earthside resources are too limited."

"I know," Sam sighed, "but it can't be helped. Oh; and we should get some very strong coffee on the go; that hyper-caffeinated slurry from P4C-196 should do the trick although my stomach won't thank me for it. I imagine Michelle will start working her way through any sleeping minds in the vicinity until I respond to her challenge. She seems to think of them as being in some way 'my stuff', or my games."

"So she attacks them to draw you out?"

"Not so much attacks," Sam stressed. "She thinks like a child, Sir. To her mind, what she's doing is not damaging things that matter to me; she's attacking my pride as a games player. She's calling me out like a prize fighter, telling me she's a better player than I am. Trouble is, it's probably true."

"You beat her once, but hopefully it won't come to that, Major. I'll have someone contact the Asgard; you concentrate on finding this girl the old-fashioned way."

"Yes, Sir," Sam agreed. "We'll get to work on it."

"We'll brief properly on this matter in two hours," Hammond said. "Dismissed."

*

"So what do we know?" Hammond asked.

Sam, Jonas and Janet shuffled their feet, despondently. Teal'c sat as still as ever, but he was clearly as worried as his friends.

"Well," Sam murmured. "We know her name is Michelle. We know what she looks like. And...she sounds like she's well-educated and American. Probably East Coast; maybe upper class New York or New Hampshire."

Hammond looked as though he was expecting more.

"And...and...we believe her to be in full time care, supervised by a woman named Cassidy. Either Cassidy Something or Something Cassidy; we're not sure."

"It's possible this Cassidy is a sleep researcher," Janet chipped in. That's a pretty specialised field, so it shouldn't be too hard to narrow the possibilities down. As long as this woman publishes..."

"And I find it hard to believe that a woman who names her computer-generated dreamscape the 'Cassasphere' wouldn't want to publish as much as possible," Sam noted.

"...we should have something on her by lunchtime. There's also the equipment. We know that she was using some kind of sensory deprivation tank and a lot of very fancy computer equipment. We don't know exactly what they were using – everything in their old base was too badly damaged when Cassidy and her cohort burned their lab – but it wasn't the kind of set-up you can acquire from the high-street."

"That's one for the NID," Sam added. "They've got the resources for that kind of exhaustive trace."

"We're looking at lists of missing children named Michelle," Jonas added. "Although that's not likely to get us anywhere very much. It's frightening how many kids run away or disappear every year, and we can't even be sure she's really called Michelle."

"I recommend SG-1 and anyone working with them use amphetamine patches to stay awake," Janet added. "Normally I'd never prescribe such a powerful stimulant, but these are not normal circumstances."

"I will not require artificial stimulants," Teal'c said.

"You have to sleep now, Teal'c," Janet reminded him.

"While it is true that I can no longer sustain myself through kelno'reem alone, I must not use artificial stimulants. This is a stricture that can not bow to necessity. Moreover, my tretonin dosage means that I require considerably less sleep than a normal human."

"Is that true?" Hammond asked.

"Yes, Sir," Janet agreed. "And I think that a thirty percent increase in dosage would reduce Teal'c's need to less than three hours a night without any danger. In the short term," she added, seriously. "Once this is over, everyone will need a few days off to dry out."

Hammond nodded his agreement. "So where do we start?" he asked.

"Jonas and I will look over the publications," Janet said.

"I'll contact Agent Barrett at the NID," Sam said. "I'm flying out to Washington in an hour; I'll need to take Teal'c with me at first, because I'm going to risk sleeping on the flight. Michelle wants to face me with a direct, electromagnetic link to the Cassasphere; I think I can spin that to make her release me."

"If you're sure?" Hammond said, doubtfully.

"I'm sure," Sam replied, with false confidence.

*

Sam lay in her seat, gazing out of the window of the USAF Gulfstream, fighting her impatience. Despite her early start and her desperate need, she found herself quite unable to get to sleep. She had considered using some kind of drug, but aside from her unwillingness to sedate herself she was not sure how that would affect her interaction with the dreamscape which Michelle inhabited.

The sky below them was cloudless; the view of the United States sliding by was utterly incredible.

"If I wanted to see the Mississippi from forty-thousand feet I bet I'd drop off in a moment," Sam groused.

"It's so pretty!" Michelle exclaimed. Sam turned and saw the girl sitting next to her, a glass sphere in her lap.

Sam started so hard that she almost woke up. She felt the shudder that always comes when you wake from the verge of dreaming, but something drew her back. Fear threatened to overwhelm her, but the clarity and mental discipline she had worked so hard to attain asserted themselves.

"You're holding me here," she realised.

"Not as such," Michelle replied. "Once I bring the game out of the viewing room and into the games room, the Cassasphere sustains it. It would take more than this to hold you fast."

"Well; please don't demonstrate if you want the 'real' me to find you."

Michelle smiled. "So; you're using your games to send me a message? That's clever. I don't think Cassidy would think of that."

"How is Cassidy?" Sam asked.

"She's well, although angry about what happened to the first Cassasphere. You know it was destroyed? I was all alone and cold while Cassidy built the new one."

"I'm sorry."

Michelle nodded. "So it was you. I thought so." She held up the glass sphere.

"What's that?"

"My crystal ball," Michelle replied. "The new Cassasphere has all this neat _stuff_ for me to play with. I built this to let me look at games without entering them. It lets me browse around; it's how I found your games again."

She held the ball closer. A mist gathered and then cleared, revealing Jack's screaming face. He did not seem to be moving.

"What have you done to him?" Sam asked.

"Nothing much," Michelle replied. "He's a strange game. I tried a whole lot of things, but not that one with the boy. I still say that was a nasty thing to put in," she added, "and since you know that it upsets me, the fact that you used it again is a low blow. But nothing else worked. Then I just let the game run for a bit. This game has a lot of different scenes, but it always slows down at the end, whatever's happening; I just made it slow to a stop. Easy really; but tricky too." She beamed, proudly.

"Sure," Sam said, distractedly, wondering what it meant that all of the Colonel's dreams ended in that peculiar elasticity of time. "Look, Michelle. You don't need to play these games. I'll come and play with you myself soon enough."

"I don't altogether trust you, Sam," Michelle admitted. "Last time you got me to give up your other games, you sent people to smash the Cassasphere. I was all alone and cold," she repeated. "I was so scared. I'm not going to let you trick me into that again."

"I don't want to," Sam assured her. "You say you can read me? Then you should know that I don't want to hurt you, Michelle."

"No," Michelle agreed. "But you're not _you_ , are you. You could have programmed this game with anything in order to trick me."

"Michelle..."

"I _can_ read you, remember," Michelle interrupted. "I know you're trying to tie me up, buy time and maybe tease out some information at the same time. You won't succeed in the first case, I'll tell you that. Surely you saw last time how good I've gotten at...what is it Cassidy calls it? Oh yes, _multitasking_. Still; it's a good try, so I'll let you have something, Sam. I'll answer three questions if you like; absolutely truthfully. Girl Scout's honour."

 _Where are you?_ Sam thought to herself. She was about to speak the question aloud, but Michelle pre-empted her.

"I'm in the Cassasphere," the girl said. "That's all I know; all I need to know. That's not a question; I won't hold it against you."

"Alright," Sam said. "Thank you. Then I'll start by asking you what your full name is?"

"My name...?" Michelle looked puzzled. "My name is Michelle. That's the only name I have. It seems strange; I'm sure I used to have another name."

Sam pushed down the shiver of discomfort that this information evoked. With an effort of will, she pushed her train of thought back to her next question. "Why are you so keen to play with me? Aren't the...games Cassidy provides to you enough?"

"They're too easy," Michelle replied. "Some are tougher than others, but Cassidy's games are getting lame. Yours are much more fun, and playing directly against you..." Michelle's face flushed with excitement, but after a moment her expression fell again. "I asked Cassidy if we could play games like that again, but she wouldn't. She just told me to go back to the old games." She sighed. "She used to play, but she doesn't seem to have much time for me anymore."

"I...I'm sorry for that," Sam said, truthfully.

Unconsciously, Michelle leaned her head against Sam's shoulder. With as little consideration, Sam put an arm around the girl.

"You have one more question," Michelle murmured.

"Who is Cassidy? What's her full name?"

Michelle was quiet for a long moment. "Mason," she said at last. "Dr Mason Ghislaine Cassidy. You...you really want to hurt her, don't you, Sam?"

"Yes," Sam sighed. "Yes I do."

"I won't let you," Cassidy said, sadly. "She may not have much time for me anymore, but she's looked after me for a long time."

"I don't think she's done a very good job."

Michelle sat up, pulling away from Sam. "I think it's time for you to leave, Sam."

*

Sam woke with a start. She looked at the digital clock on the back of the seat in front and saw that she had only been asleep for a matter of minutes. She suppressed a shudder, her sudden eviction from Michelle's dream world – and the concomitant disappearance of the warm pressure on her shoulder – had left her feeling cold.

"Teal'c," she said. "I've got the Cassidy's full name." There was a long pause. "Teal'c?"

She turned to the next seat, and saw Teal'c slumped in sleep.

"Damn," she muttered. She leaned back on her headrest, feeling even more tired than when she went to sleep. After a moment, she pulled the phone from her armrest. Janet's voice answered Sam's call.

"Teal'c's asleep," Sam explained. "We'll need an ambulance to take him from the airport. I've got a name for you to check out as well; Dr Mason Ghislaine Cassidy. That's assuming she's told Michelle the truth of course. I know it's not much to go on, but that 'Ghislaine' has a ring of truth to it. Also, it's possible the operation was out of action for a few months; that should narrow down the NID's resource trace to the last month or so."

"There can't be many dream researchers with that middle name," Janet agreed. "Of course, the trouble is that researchers don't publish by their middle names. Still; I'll see what I can find."

"Thank you," Sam replied. "Let me know what you find."

*

"Will do," Janet replied. She hung up the phone and turned to her computer, where a database of dream researchers had already been compiled. Jonas, working at impressive speed, had painstakingly scoured both the academic records and the bibliographies of dozens of new age books and websites to compile this database. She had already searched and found a dozen Cassidys among the listed names; now she brought those names up on the screen.

"Damnit," she fumed. "No Mason Cassidy, M Cassidy..." Janet sighed. She's not here.

"Mason?" Jonas asked. "I entered that name a few times," he assured Janet. "Try looking for Cassidy Mason?"

Janet returned to the full list and ran a search for Mason. "Yes!" she crowed. "Jonas, you're a genius."

"Well; above average," he allowed, checking the reference number beside Mason's name and comparing it to his notes. "That's the one," he agreed. "Dr Cassidy Mason, martyr of the alternative dream research establishment."

"Oh?"

"She was a researcher at UC Berkeley until about twelve years ago. She published two revolutionary papers on dream psychology and lucid dreaming therapy. Then she produced a book called 'Sympathetic Dreaming and the Collective Unconscious: A new therapeutic tool in the treatment of post-traumatic stress'; the book dropped out of sight and so did Dr Mason. She lost her research finding, her position at Berkeley. She just vanished from view."

Janet looked perturbed. "How does a fringe-theory drop-out come to be attacking the SGC?" she wondered.

"Well; she may not have dropped that far," Jonas suggested. "Her last published work was a fringe paper on dream images and race memory, she referenced another researcher who never published again." He held out a printout of a bibliography, with a single underlined entry.

"What's so special about...?" Janet stopped and stared. " _Depth Analysis of pre-Christian Iconography_ ," she read. "Jackson, D, 1988. What are you saying?"

"I'm saying," Jonas replied, "that vanished doesn't mean stopped. She could still be working, just not publishing; especially if her funding is coming from someone who isn't too keen on her sharing the fruits of her labours."

"NID?"

"NID, CIA; it could be any one of a hundred organisations."

"If you had to guess?"

"My money would be on the remnants of the shadow group Sam broke up," Jonas admitted. "It's possible that's why the project stopped operating for a while after we uncovered the last base; they were in hiding. If this is one of their last avenues, any surviving members of the Committee were probably torn between fear exposure and a desire to get rid of our interference."

"Let's focus on what we know for now," Janet suggested. "We can speculate about the culprits until the cows come home, but we _know_ this woman was at Berkeley twelve years ago."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Let's ring this through to Sam, then go to Berkeley and see if anyone remembers her."

"And then what?"

Janet shrugged. "I don't know," she admitted. "I'm making this up as I go along."

*

_Washington DC_

Sam watched in frustration as Teal'c was strapped onto a stretcher with a drip in his arm, then carried to an ambulance. She felt helpless to aid her friends and stop Michelle's relentless trawl through their dreams, and there was nothing Sam hated so much as feeling helpless. She turned back towards the terminal, intending to leave the airfield and travel to NID headquarters, only to see Agent Malcolm Barrett heading towards her across the tarmac.

"What are you, psychic?" she asked, although she was relieved to see him.

"Just well-connected," Barrett replied. "I brought a car so we can talk on the move."

"How much do you know?" Sam asked.

"Not much. Something to do with dreams."

"I'll drive then," Sam told him. "You listen."

 

"That's...quite a story," Barrett admitted, when Sam had brought him up to speed. "There are certainly elements of the NID who would be interested in that kind of power."

"Well, that's why we didn't exactly mention it to the NID – to anyone – before now," Sam explained. "We buried the file deeper than the foothold report. Have the NID ever funded extrasensory research?" she pressed.

"Not often," Barrett replied. "We usually just let your lot or the CIA spend the money, then appropriate their records."

"What?"

"We're thrifty at the NID."

Sam smiled. "Have any of those projects ever yielded results?" she asked, as she pulled the car into the NID's underground lot.

"Not that I've ever heard of," Barrett admitted. "But it isn't really my field. There's someone we can talk to though."

 

Barrett led Sam through the bowels of NID HQ to a basement office. The nameplate on the door had been covered by a large photograph of David Duchovny, clipped from a magazine. Sam looked questioningly at Barrett.

"Don't get your hopes up," Barrett warned.

"What's in there?" Sam asked, nervously.

"You remember Wormhole X-treme?" Barrett asked.

Sam groaned. "Please, don't," she begged. "God; I swear, I'll never live that down."

"Well, there's a reason why all the apparatus to co-opt that show into the SGC's cover was already in place. It had been done before." He turned the handle and opened the door, then led Sam into the cramped space beyond; a dank office converted from a heating duct room. Filing cabinets ran back into the shadowed recesses of the low-ceilinged chamber.

"Muldoon?" Barrett called. "Skellan?"

"You have got to be kidding me," Sam said.

"I wish."

"Is that you, Malcolm?" A woman emerged from the shadows, tall and lean with an angular face, dressed in a black trouser suit that had seen far better days. Her hair was a tangle of unkempt titian locks in dire need of styling, held back by a black headscarf. She looked at Barrett through round-lensed glasses, with an expression of amused antagonism that was echoed in her voice. " _So_ good to see you. Oh; and you brought a _friend_ ," the woman cooed, "isn't that nice."

Barrett began the introductions. "Agent Donna Skellan; Major..."

"...Major Samantha Carter, of Stargate Command."

Sam turned to face the new speaker, a small, curly-haired man in a grey suit.

"Second in command of SG-1," the man went on, reciting in a bland voice. "Briefly host to no less than two alien entities, romantically entangled with a third..."

"Stop showing off, Muldoon," Skellan sighed. She glowered the man into silence, then turned back to Sam. "This is Renard Muldoon, my partner; a professional anal retentive. I can't apologise for him enough, Major. I take it this isn't a social call."

"No," Sam agreed.

Muldoon sloped over to his desk and sat down. Skellan dug out a second chair for Sam, while Barrett found a pair of stools for himself and the lanky agent.

"So; how can we help you?" Skellan asked.

"I honestly have _no_ idea," Sam admitted.

Skellan smiled. "We may not look like much, but Muldoon – waste of human skin though he is – knows these files better than anyone else in the world."

"What's in these files?" Sam asked.

"Dead programmes," Barrett explained. "Every scheme the NID ever trashed; every military plan we nipped in the bud; every academic research project we ever appropriated and buried."

"It's a graveyard," Muldoon agreed. "So what can we offer you today, Agent Barrett? A death ray, perhaps? Secret mind-control programme?"

"Something a little more like the latter," Barrett replied. "Dream control."

"Run by someone called Dr Cassidy Mason," Sam added.

"Cassidy Mason?" Muldoon mused. "The name rings a bell, but..." He stood up and headed between the shadowed rows of filing cabinets. "Dream research is down here, somewhere. The NID has entertained a little research into psychic projection and dream control from time to time; always unsuccessfully, so far."

"Well, someone's been successful," Sam assured him. "Last year, three of my colleagues were trapped in a dreamscape."

"Trapped?" Skellan asked.

"Comatose," Sam explained. "Their brains stuck in a repeating dream that they couldn't break out of. An external influence – a girl – held them in a kind of loop."

Skellan looked sceptical. "This girl can actually force someone into a coma?"

"Not on her own," Sam replied. "This Dr Mason has apparently created a system which generates a virtual reality which the girl inhabits; somehow that reality can interface with other peoples' dreams. The girl is like a...control unit; a central processor for the device. I don't think she can do anything until you're dreaming, but once she interfaces, a carrier signal boosts delta waves in the brain to keep you trapped in a sleeping state; then bursts of theta waves carry the dream images."

"Barrett!" Muldoon called. "Come and give me a hand with this lot."

"So," Skellan said, trying to sound casual. "You travel to other planets?"

"Yes."

"How's that working out for you?"

"Pretty good. So...What do _you_ do?"

"Fringe investigation and research programme," Skellan replied, with an edge of despair in her voice. "When the loonies spot a werewolf in Georgia; we're there. When a UFO is spotted in Louisiana; we get the call. I've waded through more sewers after more non-existent alligators than you can possibly imagine. The programme's had nine positive results in over two hundred investigations over the last fifteen years, and six of those were snatched off us by the Wormchasers."

Sam raised an eyebrow. "Wormchasers?"

"Barrett's old mob; the DEEA; Division for Earthbound Extraterrestrial Activity. We call them Wormchasers because they spend so much of their time chasing around after your lot." She grinned, apparently drawing endless amusement from the DEEA's misfortune. "Even when they get onto something before you do, the SGC seems to beat them to the punch."

"Is that why you don't like Agent Barrett?" Sam asked.

"Oh, I don't dislike him," Skellan admitted, in a soft voice. "He just...He treats us like a resource; like one of those informants he keeps on tap. Shows up down here every six weeks or so, dangles a case in front of us, then like as not takes it away from us in time for the arrest."

"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave."

"He's a player," Skellan replied, casually. "And in all fairness, we're not exactly placed to organise a proper bust. If we're lucky, we can get the overtime approved when we're on surveillance."

"Right!" Muldoon announced, returning from the filing cabinets with a thick stack of folders in his arms. Barrett followed with another load, even bigger.

"What's this?" Sam asked.

"Everything we have on dream research," Muldoon replied. "We'll need to go through it by hand, I'm afraid. None of this stuff has been computerised yet."

"Oh, whacko," Skellan muttered. "I'll put the kettle on, then."

*

_UC Berkeley_

Janet tried to subtly move away from Jonas as they walked across the UC Berkeley campus towards the Department of Psychology. The Kelownan had picked up a guide book on the way in and was now acting for all the world like a tourist. Moreover, he was still thrilling her – if thrill was the right word, and it most certainly was not – with the endless stream of facts about Berkeley's psychological research that he had gleaned from the internet. Janet was eager to disassociate herself from him in the face of the stares of passing students, in addition to tuning everything he was saying to a background hum.

To try and take her mind off Jonas, she reviewed the known facts in her head. During her time at Berkeley, Dr Cassidy Mason had first studied and then worked under Professor of Experimental Psychology Dr Lewis Trent, himself something of a maverick with an interest in parapsychology and a sideline in debunking psychics. Trent's file made for interesting reading. Mason's – while more interesting still – made for no reading at all. It simply did not exist; which was what was so interesting. Only scraps of records remained to confirm that Dr Mason had ever attended UC Berkeley. The college should have had extensive files on a woman who had taken her PhD with them and stayed on as a post-doctoral researcher, but they had nothing; not even a social security number.

"Dr Fraiser?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes; absolutely," Janet replied, trying to focus on Jonas' words once more.

"Absolutely what?" he asked.

"Um. Whatever you were saying."

"I was saying that it's incredible the kinds of experiments people are allowed to run in your universities," Jonas said, apparently taking no offence. "I mean, my people are hardly saints when it comes to our research decisions, but for every branch of academic study the High Minister appointed a dozen advisers and special advisers, just like me, responsible for ethical oversight."

"Just like you?"

"Well; maybe not as pretty," Jonas allowed. He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder. "I think this is it," he said. "Professor Trent's office should be down this path; behind the main building."

"How long did you look at that campus map for?" Janet asked, eyeing Jonas shrewdly.

Jonas grinned, well aware that his hyperawareness was a source of some amusement to his colleagues. "Actually, there's a sign just over there," he told Janet. "You probably would have spotted it if you weren't trying so hard to look like you don't know me. I think most of the students we passed think we're in the middle of breaking up. I must just have that kind of face," he mused. "People always assume I'm with someone."

Janet laughed, enjoying a lighter moment amid the grind of anxiety. She took him by the arm. "Come on then, Angel-pie," she said, in a jolly, folksy voice. "Let's go see the nice Professor."

 

There were, in retrospect, a great many adjectives that Janet would have used to describe the resident of the little brick building behind the psychology department; nice was not one of them. On their way in a passing undergrad – mistaking them for the parents of a prospective student – took it on himself to warn them away.

"You know why they built this room just for ExPsych?" he asked, rhetorically. His voice dropped to an ominous whisper. "So the other professors don't have to listen to the screams."

"His experimental subjects scream?" Jonas asked, appalled.

"No, man," the student replied. "His _students_."

"Did he really just call you 'man'?" Janet wondered, as the student walked away. "Maybe he volunteered for cryogenics testing in the seventies." She shrugged. "Oh well; I guess this is Berkeley, after all."

"Well, yes," Jonas agreed. "There's a sign by the gate. It says Berkeley."

Janet shook her head. "Oh, Jonas; you've been reading all the wrong books about this place." She walked past the confused alien and opened the door marked 'Professor L. Trent'.

Janet showed her Air Force credentials to the professor's secretary and the young woman asked them to take a seat. Jonas went to sit down but Janet stayed standing, subtly putting pressure on the secretary as she called through to the inner office.

"I'm afraid the professor can't see you just now," she said at last. "I can book you an appointment to see him tomorrow if you'd like?"

"That's not good enough," Janet insisted. "We need to see him now."

"I'm sorry; but he's very busy and..." the girl realised that she was talking to herself; Janet had already turned to the inner office door. "You can't go in...!"

Janet ignored the protest and thrust the door open, causing the student who sat with his back to the door to jump in alarm. Jonas followed Janet into the office, shrugging an apology to the flustered secretary.

The man behind the deck looked up, slowly and calmly. He looked kind of like a vulture; almost completely bald with a thin neck and deep, black eyes. His age was hard to judge, but Janet would have guessed somewhere between fifty and sixty. He was almost grotesque in appearance, but there was a power in his gaze; a fanatical gleam that was eerily fascinating. A weaker woman might have been enthralled by that ebony stare, and even Janet felt uncomfortable under its weight, her righteous rush stalled in the face of such cold calm.

"May I help you?" Professor Lewis Trent asked. "Miss...?"

"Major," Janet managed to say, calling on her military rank. She did not do so often, but sometimes people did not take you seriously as an investigator if you said you were a doctor. "Major Janet Fraiser, M.D.; US Air Force." She stopped, trying to remember what she was here for.

"And your friend?" Trent asked, coolly.

"Jonas Quinn," Jonas replied, pushing past Janet. The basilisk glower turned on the Kelownan; it might as well have been a theatrical spotlight for all the impact it made on Jonas' performance. He strode up to the desk and extended his hand, shaking the student's hand instead when Trent ignored him. "Sorry to interrupt," he told the young man. "We need to talk to the Professor, urgently, regarding a former student of his."

"I am in the middle of a supervision," Trent said. "Perhaps if you could come back later," he suggested, returning his disconcerting eyes to Janet. Somehow, Jonas' jocular, irrepressible presence diffused the effect and she was able to shake off the effect of that gaze.

"This can't wait," she insisted. "You can wait outside," she told the student, who looked nervously between the grim faces of Janet and Trent and the smiling countenance of Jonas Quinn. He chose to leave, and Janet wondered if his decision had been influenced by the – understandable but incorrect – assumption that Trent controlled his grades but the Air Force might carry pistols.

Janet and Jonas took the two chairs in front of the desk without invitation.

Trent sighed. "Well, Major Fraiser? As I have an unexpected window in my schedule, please tell me how can I be of assistance?"

"We need to ask you about Cassidy Mason," Jonas replied.

"I don't recall the name," Trent assured them.

"No?" Jonas asked. "She studied under you for four years then worked as your research assistant for two years more. This would be about twelve years ago."

"Ah yes; perhaps I remember her. I don't think I had much contact with her as a student..."

"But you were her supervisor," Jonas pointed out. "And you must have thought something of her if you invited her back as your research assistant?"

Trent's left eye flickered. "Alright," he sighed. "Yes, I remember Cassidy Mason; however much I try not to."

"Really?" Janet asked. "Why is that?"

"She was a brilliant student," he admitted. "And a brilliant researcher; a true polymath. As well as excelling in psychology she was a biologist and cyberneticist. If she had a flaw as a scholar it was that the interdisciplinary nature of her work made it hard for her to find funding through the more specialised system of grant-awarding funds. However..." Trent steepled his fingers, pensively. "She was erratic. Her behaviour towards fellow researchers – even professors – was rude at best. Her work was radical, to say the least, but she never produced any results you see. She also reneged on her teaching commitments and saw budget reports as something that happened to other people."

"And so she was dismissed?" Janet asked.

"Actually, no. She left before the inquiry was completed. I can't say that anyone was particularly sorry to see the back of her."

"And do you have her records on file?"

"I'm sure we do." Trent pressed his intercom buzzer. "Celia," he said.

The secretary's voice rose from the speaker. "Yes, Professor Trent?"

"Can you look in my files please, Celia; expired researcher entries. Bring me the file on Dr Cassidy Mason."

"Yes, Professor."

"So, what were your personal impressions of Dr Mason?" Jonas asked.

"As I said, she was erratic. She had no respect for authority or academic conventions," he went on, his voice rising tensely. "As to her personal life...Well, I assure you that we are as open-minded as the next department; assuming the next department isn't Classics, of course. Ordinarily we would say that someone's private life was their own business, but in Cassidy's case _she_ made sure that her personal life was anything but private. There was something of a scandal," he admitted.

"She had an affair with one of the professors." Janet guessed.

"No; one of her students," Trent replied. "While frowned on officially, that would not have been _so_ serious, but they were caught together."

"But if that wasn't a serious offence...?" Jonas began.

"In flagrante," Trent added.

"Still..."

"In the laboratory."

"I see..."

"By the Board of Regents."

"Oh."

"One of whom was the boy's mother. Suffice it to say that she did not take kindly to the scene. Cassidy was probably wise to disappear when she did." He frowned at the door. "What is taking that girl so long?" he wondered aloud. He pressed the buzzer again and called Celia's name twice, but there was no reply. "Excuse me a moment," he said.

"I get the feeling this is a waste of time," Janet sighed. "Although I admit that, as a peek into the sordid underbelly of academia, it's fascinating in a road-accident kind of way. Do you think they were having an affair? Mason and Trent?"

Jonas shook his head. "He didn't bat an eyelid when you suggested she'd had an affair with a professor. Although he does keep calling her 'Cassidy'," he mused. He picked up a photograph from the desk and looked at it, critically. "He must have something going for him," he noted, showing the picture to Janet. It showed Trent, about ten years younger than the real thing, sitting beside a handsome woman his own age, and flanked by four children, aged between nine and twenty.

"No accounting for taste," Janet replied, replacing the photograph.

"I'm sorry," Professor Trent said, coming back into the office; he sounded genuinely flustered. "It appears that the file is...Well, that Cassidy's files are..."

"Missing?" Jonas suggested.

"No-one's had that file out for years," Celia insisted, hovering nervously in the doorway. "I checked the sign-out sheets."

"That assumes the system was implemented properly," Trent hissed.

"I _always_ make sure the files are signed for," Celia insisted, with an air of wounded professional pride. "The last person to look at Dr Mason's file was you, Professor. You signed out both the employment file and her student record in 1991; before I started working for you."

"Yes; I...I needed it to write a reference for her," Trent remembered.

"For whom was the reference?" Janet asked. "I mean, the people who asked you for the reference?"

"I don't remember," Trent replied, shortly. He sat down and sank in on himself. "My secretary – that would be Mrs Arnold, who is no longer with us – would have written the meat of the reference, anyway. There was a copy, of course, but that would have been kept in Cassidy's file with her exit information. I'm sorry, Major Fraiser; it seems you have had a wasted journey."

"It does, doesn't it," Janet agreed. "Well, thank you, Professor. We'll see ourselves out." She rose to her feet and swept out, impatiently.

"Thank you for your time," Jonas said, offering his hand again. This time Trent accepted the gesture. On his way out, Jonas paused to give Celia an understanding smile.

At the door of the building, Jonas stopped. "You go on," he told Janet. "I'll catch up."

"What...?" Janet asked.

"Forgot my keys," Jonas claimed, unconvincingly. Janet shook her head and walked away to find some lunch for them both. Technically, a member of the SGC was supposed to keep Jonas in sight at all times when he was off-base, but that seemed unnecessarily paranoid.

Sure enough, Jonas made no attempt to flee, and he met up with Janet half an hour later. She was sitting on a rail beside the door, finishing her lunch. She handed him a bag containing a bottle of water and a chicken salad sandwich, then asked: "Well?"

"Cassidy Mason's research began well," Jonas said. "Her work was sound for precisely one semester. She published two papers, was great friends with Professor Trent and got along well with all of her colleagues. Then...something happened to make her go off the rails."

"And you learned this how?" Janet asked.

"How do you find out what's really going on in a hospital?" Jonas challenged in return.

"Easy," Janet replied. "Ask the chief of the nursing staff."

"How do you find out what's going on in a university?"

"Ask the secretary," Janet realised.

"Administrative assistant is the preferred term, these days," Jonas demurred. "But it's as true in your world as in mine. Anyway, according to Miss Massy..."

"Miss...You mean Celia?"

Jonas nodded. "She says that the only person Professor Trent ever talks to about Cassidy Mason is a Dr Terry Giles; a psychiatrist who used to study here." He held out a piece of paper. "This is Dr Giles' office address and phone number. She works in the City."

"Nice work," Janet admitted. "Oh; and is this Dr Giles' home number?"

"No. That's Miss Massy's number, in case there's anything else we need to ask."

"Anything?" Janet asked, teasing.

Jonas looked blank.

"The girl gives you her phone number and you can't call her Celia because you haven't been introduced," Janet laughed. "Did anyone ever tell you you're a total square, Jonas?"

"Yes," he replied, without offence.

"Well alright," Janet said. "Looks like it's finally time to take my ex-husband's advice and go see a shrink."

*

_Washington_

Given the limited space at Muldoon's desk, Sam and Skellan had retreated to the latter's office in the ladies restroom.

"You work here?"

"It's not so bad. No-one else ever uses the bathroom on this level, so I have it all to myself. Besides, neither Muldoon nor Agent Barrett ever disturb me in here." Skellan sighed. "Can you believe people spend taxpayers' money on this?"

"Well, don't they say you can judge a public building by its toilets."

"I think they say you can judge a society by its public buildings," Skellan replied. "I think you can judge a restaurant by its toilets. But I meant these projects. No wonder they were discontinued. I mean, really; trying to get technicians to dream up – quite literally – innovations ahead of the technology curve. What were they thinking?"

"Stranger projects get funding," Sam assured her.

"Like..." Skellan picked up another file and glanced at the top sheet. "Playing Russian music to sleeping mystics in an attempt to make them dream Kremlin secrets? Project: Cossack Song," she scoffed.

Sam grinned.

The door banged open; Sam and Skellan both leaped up, reaching for their sidearms, but it was only Muldoon hovering on the threshold, and all he was waving at them was a file. "I've got it!"

"Is it catching?" Skellan asked. She winced. "I'm sorry; that's a terribly old joke."

"And a terrible old joke at that," Muldoon agreed. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you."

"Why not show us here?" Sam asked.

"I can't come into the ladies'?" Muldoon insisted, appalled at the suggestion.

 

"Alright," Muldoon said. "Here's the thing. The rather fancifully named Project: Dreamcatcher."

"Any mention of Cassidy Mason?" Sam asked.

"Yes," Muldoon assured her.

"No," Barrett said at the same time. "There is not," he insisted.

"There is. Look; project head, Dr W.A. Mozart; that's Mason."

"But how..."

"Dreamcatcher was an under-funded Navy programme investigating the use of dream therapy and sensory-deprivation techniques for the treatment of high-pressure nervous syndrome. The NID appropriated it and gave it to the mysterious Dr Mozart..."

"What makes you think..."

"...when the initial project showed a few results which _could_ have been interpreted as extrasensory experiences."

"Just let him run," Skellan suggested in a whisper. "He knows his stuff, but getting an answer's rarely worth the effort when he's in exposition mode."

"An NID report quickly branded the project costly and unethical and it was shut down."

"Unethical?" Skellan asked.

"The project involved holding a subject in an isolation tank without relief, under sedation and fed through a tube."

Sam looked at Skellan, impressed. _How did you do that?_ She mouthed.

"Something about the tone of voice," Skellan whispered. "Seems to get through to him if I put a bit of extra bass into it."

"After the report the project was closed down," Muldoon went on.

"But..." Barrett began.

Muldoon spoke over Barrett's attempt to hijack the flow. "But, the man who shut down the project was Assistant Director William Kitteridge; a known employee of the Committee who 'shut down' several other projects in order to move them to the private sector."

"It sounds promising," Sam admitted. "But it all seems circumstantial."

"Well," Muldoon admitted, "there is also the fact that the warehouse where the NID Dreamcatcher lab was set up burned down a few months ago when the USAF tried to raid it."

"Great," Sam sighed. "That's the one. Let's have a look at that file then; see if there's anything that will help us."

*

_San Francisco_

Dr Theresa Giles met Janet and Jonas in a quiet, little Italian restaurant in San Francisco. She was a fair haired woman with a calm, professional air that was betrayed by the way she fiddled anxiously with a gold wedding ring on her left hand.

"Why are mental health professionals always so screwed up?" Janet whispered as they spotted her.

Jonas frowned and they walked over to the woman. "Dr Giles?" he asked.

"Terry, please," she insisted, rising to shake their hands. "Mr Quinn?"

"Jonas. This is Dr Janet Fraiser."

"I'm glad to meet you both," she said. "It's...We haven't heard much from Cassidy lately. I can't deny we've been worried. Is she...Is she in some kind of trouble."

"She..." Jonas broke off while the waitress came over. Terry ordered her lunch and Janet and Jonas agreed to split a garlic bread for form's sake. "She may be in trouble," Jonas went on. "We really don't know. We were hoping that you could help us to find her."

"I'm sorry," Terry replied. "I have no contact with her. I haven't actually spoken to Cassidy since she left the university."

"We understand that," Janet assured her. "But perhaps you can tell us a little bit about her; something you know might just help us."

"I can't think what."

"Well; try starting at the beginning," Jonas suggested. "How did you know Dr Mason?"

"Cassidy was my roommate," Terry replied. "We were friends all through college and did our doctorates together. We drifted apart a little when she went into research and I went on to study psychiatry, but we stayed friends. I was at the party where she met Mike."

"Mike?" Jonas asked.

"Michael. Her fiancé. Didn't...didn't you know?"

Janet sighed. "Someone has destroyed all of her files, Terry. We really don't know very much at all."

"Oh. Well...she was an incredible woman," Terry said, almost reverently. "She was passionate and intense as a student and she had this incredible energy that seemed to draw people in. She used to call me her partner in crime, but I was more of a sidekick really; everything she did, I just followed her, right up until I decided to go into practice. She introduced me to my future husband, Craig." She laughed a little bitterly. "Although I often wonder if he wasn't in love with _her_ all along. Everyone did love her, you see. I know I did. She had..."

There was a catch in Terry's voice as she continued. "She had a way of making you feel good about yourself. If not for that I wouldn't have had the nerve to even talk to Craig. That was after...when she was engaged to Michael Trent. That was her best time; she was almost luminous."

"Michael Trent?" Jonas asked. "Was he..."

"Professor Trent's eldest boy," Terry confirmed. "God, he was a hunk," she sighed.

"I saw his picture," Janet agreed, with a sympathetic smile.

Terry returned the smile, but it was shaky. "I guess I can't blame Craig too much if he was really after Cassidy; I was kind of after Mike after all. But then...There was the accident."

Janet's face fell. "Oh."

"They went out to Professor Trent's cabin in the hills," Terry explained. "I never knew what they fought about, but Mike hit out for home on Saturday night, leaving Cassidy stranded. As near as anyone could make out, as soon as the storm started he turned around and headed back. He went off the road three miles short of the cabin. She called a cab the next morning and they found the car on the way back to Berkeley."

"Oh my God," Jonas murmured.

"Cassidy blamed herself, but she refused to take any time off. She threw herself into her research and...She became unstable. She lost all professional detachment and in her private life she started attacking her friends. That way she'd had of making people feel worthwhile? It turned out she was just as good at making you feel bad."

There was another pause as the food arrived, but only Jonas really seemed to feel like eating.

"She started having affairs; nasty, short-lived flings, full of bitterness. I saw her with several of those lovers; five, six, maybe seven different men in just a couple of months. She clearly didn't like them at all. She never kissed one of them; barely even looked at them. They worshipped her and she treated them like dogs. She was punishing herself by being with people she couldn't stand and she was punishing them for being with her. The sex was...violent. I could hear them in her room, _screaming_ and...And then sometimes we'd be in the lounge and she'd suddenly come over, sit on my lap, curl up like a child and sob on my shoulder."

Terry shivered. "I didn't know what was going on with her. I...I gave up moved out and moved in with Craig. I couldn't bear to be around her anymore; I wanted to be there for her but I just couldn't. She must have decided I needed to be punished as well, because she tried to seduce Craig. It was a clumsy attempt; even Craig, still half in love with her didn't go for it. The next day he was suspended for sexually harassing _her_."

"Suspended from...?" Jonas prompted.

"Oh; he was a researcher in the department as well. We all graduated together: Cassidy, Craig, Mike and I. We couldn't believe what she'd done, so I went to speak to her. She...She told me she and Craig had had an affair two years before, then she called security and had me removed from the lab. Professor Trent told me that neither Craig nor I would be welcome in the department again."

"So he didn't know...?"

"He didn't _want_ to know. She was already like a daughter to him; that was why...Do you know about...about what happened when..."

"The thing with the Regent's son?" Janet asked.

"Ah. You don't know then."

"Don't know what?"

"Terry?" Jonas prompted, gently.

"The Regent in question was Mrs Madeline Schoenberg-Trent. The son was Bill Trent; Mike's younger brother."

"Good God!" Janet exclaimed.

"I spoke to her that evening. Professor Trent asked me down to see if I could get any sense out of her. All she would say was: 'He was so kind. He shouldn't have been so kind when I killed his son'."

"So what happened to her?"

"Well...Professor Trent apologised to Craig and I of course, and he asked us to try and find out what was going on with Cassidy. He said he couldn't help her any more; Madeline was less inclined to try and understand Cassidy than he was.

"We looked through her files and...and we found out that she'd changed the direction of her research. She was trying to find a way to contact the dead through dreams. That was when we realised she was completely mad, of course." Terry laughed, bitterly. "You'd think I'd have noticed, wouldn't you? Being a trainee psychiatrist and all. Anyway, we looked further and discovered that Cassidy was using her grant money – and she'd got a _lot_ of extra funding from _somewhere_ – to pay..." She tailed off in a certain horror. From the corner of her eye she saw Jonas' eyes flicker briefly to her pasta and pushed the bowl towards him.

"Cassidy was devising ESP experiments involving sensory deprivation. She was spending upwards of fifty hours at a stretch in an isolation tank, writing reams of notes on her dreams. She...She thought that she was able to touch the dreams of others and to speak with the spirit of her dead fiancé. Her journals were full of delusional, paranoid ravings. She thought that he wanted to hurt her and that seems to have been why she set out to hurt him." Tears rose in Terry's eyes. "God, it was so pathetic and tragic. But then...There was other stuff; stuff that made you feel a lot less sorry for her."

"If you need to stop," Jonas said.

"No. I need...I need to finish. If you need to know about her, you have to know this. Cassidy had created a thought experiment. She proposed locking a child into an isolation tank for life; drip-feed, linked to a computer that would monitor their brainwaves and pipe in sounds and images to make the mind active when she wanted it. She thought she could program the computer to decipher the child's brainwaves and study the phenomena she believed she had observed."

Jonas pushed the pasta away, unfinished. "That's..."

"A thought experiment," Janet assured him. "You couldn't ever do..."

"Except that Cassidy had already arranged to buy a child from an orphanage in Oakland. She'd already been performing experiments on coma patients without consent for six months. There was a lot of trouble; a lot of people lost their jobs. Professor Trent still looked after Cassidy though. He hushed up her involvement and arranged for her to be quietly carted off to an asylum upstate. She disappeared from the nuthouse six months after that. No-one ever saw her again."

"I thought Professor Trent wrote her a reference?" Jonas said.

"Why would you think that?"

"He told us so," Janet replied. "He said he wrote her a reference in 1991. He'd signed out her files."

"He signed out the files and I made some copies for the doctors at the asylum," Terry explained.

"I don't..." Janet hesitated. "I don't suppose you have any of her notes still?"

"A few," Terry replied. "Would you like to see them?"

Janet took a twenty from her wallet and dropped it on the table. "Let's go," she said.

*

_Washington_

"Call for you," Muldoon said, holding out the phone. "Apparently they can't reach your mobile down here."

"Thanks," Sam replied, taking the proffered handset, glad of any excuse to get away from the tedious grind of the Dreamcatcher files. She was starting to feel distinctly groggy, despite the amphetamines, and twelve cups of black coffee had left her with a griping stomach ache. Dinner – instant noodles and sliced bread – had not helped much.

"Sam?"

"Janet; what have you found?"

"Do you have a fax machine there?" Janet asked.

Sam gave the number and after a few moments a transmission came through and began to print out. She looked at the top sheet. "What am I looking at?"

"The schematics for Cassidy Mason's dream chamber."

"Where are you, Janet?"

"At the apartment of Mason's erstwhile best friend, Dr Giles. There are a bunch more files here; I think I've built up a pretty good list of the components she must be using. I've contacted the base and they're running a search for those purchases. It should be easy enough; there're a lot of very unusual components here. If she's still using the chamber, that is."

"I think she must be," Sam said. "Possibly combined with some of the Navy's research. She must use the communication systems to create her protected connection to Michelle. Her presence in the Cassasphere is just a projection; that's why Michelle can't read her. I'll get the NID computer resources on this as well."

"There's...There's something else," Janet added.

"Jonas," Sam realised.

"Dr Giles put him to bed and is keeping an eye on him."

Sam sighed. "We don't have much time then," she said. "Thank you, Janet."

"Take care, Sam. And what ever you do... _Don't_ get some rest."

 

After an hour, Skellan went for take-out Chinese to try and settle Sam's stomach ache.

"Is that really a good idea?" Sam asked.

"How should I know?" the NID agent replied.

"Aren't you a doctor?"

Skellan laughed. "I have a first class degree in art history. Don't believe everything you see on the television, Major Carter," she advised. "I mean; did _you_ work your way through the Academy as a pole-dancer?"

Sam groaned. Since Wormhole X-treme's move to the SciFi Channel, Stacy Monroe's back-story had haunted her worse than any skeletons in her own closet. She supposed it must be the same for Donna Skellan. "Art history?" she asked.

"We cover a wide spectrum. I was three years on the Bureau's Art Theft Program before I joined the NID." She gave a wistful sigh. "Happy days. Still, phoney aliens – or real aliens even – are at least less likely to shoot at you than art smugglers."

Skellan left Sam with Muldoon and Barrett, pouring over the Dreamcatcher files, until Muldoon's computer beeped.

"What've you got?" Sam asked."

"The results of the purchase search," Muldoon replied, scanning the document he had been sent. "Those were some pretty specialised components; only a few companies in the world make them. As I suspected, no-one's bought all of them from a single company, but I asked data handling to cross-reference the purchase records for all of the manufacturers and...Damn!"

"Nothing?" Barrett asked.

"Nothing," Muldoon admitted. "No single buyer has been invoiced for more than a third of the components that chamber requires."

"It was worth a shot," Barrett sighed.

"Wait a minute," Sam said. "Invoiced?"

"Yes," Muldoon replied. "You see, when you buy something by mail order they send you a piece of paper..."

"Shut up, Muldoon," Sam said, patiently. "Try checking _delivery_ addresses."

"Delivery...?"

"The Committee have thousands of front companies," Barrett said. "They could buy all these parts and not pay for any two through the same company..."

"...but everything has to end up in the same place!" Muldoon realised. "Brilliant!"

"Above average," Sam agreed.

Barrett smiled at her. "Have you ever had second thoughts?" he asked.

"Not since the first time I saw the Stargate open," she assured him.

Barrett looked away, awkwardly.

"What?" Sam asked.

"Never seen that," Barrett admitted.

"If we crack this case, I'll give you a tour," Sam promised.

"Bingo!" Muldoon announced, with satisfaction. "The Gull Sleep Therapy Centre in Philadelphia."

Sam checked the readouts. "But they only took delivery of an iso-tank and a couple of computer servers."

"All the heavy equipment," Muldoon pointed out, with a trace of smugness. "All the lightweight stuff – everything that would be easy to reship in an unmarked van, say – can be traced to a half-dozen different recipients in the area."

"But how can we be sure this is the place?" Barrett demanded.

"Come on," Muldoon replied, appealing to Sam and Skellan. "The _Gull_ Centre?"

The other two looked at him, blankly.

"Sir William Gull," he prompted. "Jack the Ripper?"

"You've lost me," Sam admitted.

Muldoon sighed. "Malcolm?"

"You lost me before you lost her."

"Sir William Gull, Royal Physician, is one of the possible suspects in the Jack the Ripper killings that took place in Whitechapel between August and November of 1888. Between four and eight prostitutes were murdered by an unknown individual, who mutilated their bodies with an almost clinical skill and..."

"We know who Jack the Ripper is," Barrett assured him, interrupting the monologue before it could get too involved and grisly. "Can you just get to the point for once?"

Muldoon looked hurt by the interruption, but having looked around to assure himself that he was still the centre of attention he continued. "Sir William Gull was supposed to have committed the murders in order to protect the royal family from a scandal, as part of a _Masonic_ conspiracy."

Sam and Barrett looked blank.

"Masonic? _Mason_."

"That's pretty weak, even for you, Muldoon," Barrett said.

"Admittedly," Muldoon allowed. "Except that we know Dr Mason likes to play with Masonic references. Mozart," he prompted, in response to their baffled gazes. "Dr W.A. Mozart, her former alias? As in Wolfgang..."

"We know who Mozart is," Sam said.

"Then you know that his operas are full of Masonic imagery?"

"Alright; I didn't know that," Sam confessed.

A long pause was broken by Skellan's return.

"So he might just have something," Barrett admitted.

"Muldoon?" Skellan asked. She dumped her bags on the table. "Will wonders never cease."

"He thinks that Mason is dumb enough to give all her fronts Masonic cues," Barrett explained.

Skellan shrugged. "I don't know about dumb enough," she said, "but from what you've said, this chick is certainly mad enough." She passed a package to Sam. "Maybe only Muldoon is nuts enough to catch her. Lemon chicken, right?"

"Thanks." Sam was quiet for a long moment. "It's worth a look," she decided.

Barrett shrugged. "We'll get a flight out to Philadelphia then," he agreed. "You and I will see if we can find building plans for the Centre. If the Committee stay true to form they'll probably have used government contractors so the blueprints should be easy enough to dig up. Muldoon and Skellan can try the direct approach; go to this Gull Centre and ask them about themselves, discreetly."

"And then what?" Skellan asked.

"By then we should be ready to try the _very_ direct approach."

Sam shook her head. "This is what I _do_ miss about intelligence work," she admitted. "We never really get to violate anyone's civil rights in the SGC."

_*_

_Philadelphia_

The Gull Sleep Therapy Centre was housed in an old hospital on the outskirts of the City of Brotherly Love. The building had been done up, but nothing more than a little sign identified it as the Gull Centre. A rather larger sign insisted that it was private property and that trespassers would be prosecuted. Guard dogs patrolled behind a mesh fence topped with coils of razor-wire.

"Charming, isn't it," Barrett said, eyeing the fortressed building on the small screen perched on the desk in front of them.

"Lovely," Sam agreed. "I know that if I were a deeply disturbed psychiatric patient, I'd find that place very relaxing." She and Barrett were in the Philadelphia NID field office while they watched a feed from a camera in Skellan's handbag. "Can we trust those two?"

"I know you've had some bad experiences with the NID in the past..."

"I don't mean...Can we _rely_ on them?"

"They're a little flaky," Barrett replied, "but they weren't recruited on a whim. Watch."

 

The receptionist at the Gull Centre was a bubbly, smiling blonde in a neat little blue-and-white uniform, similar to a nurse's but with slightly less fabric. A little, blue nurse's cap was perched at a jaunty angle atop a fashionable haircut. The length of the fingernails which she was carefully painting suggested that she did not really work as a nurse; she probably wasn't much of a typist either.

Muldoon and Skellan approached the desk in silence, the little man almost absurdly coaxing the taller woman forward.

"Excuse me?" Muldoon said.

The girl looked up and beamed at them. "Good afternoon Sir, Madam; welcome to the Gull Sleep Therapy Centre."

"I...good afternoon," Skellan choked.

"My name is Peter Erickson," Muldoon lied. "This is my wife, Maria. We were hoping that we could talk to somebody. About our son."

"Your son?" The girl blinked, confused.

"Little Pete," Muldoon said, with a catch in his throat. "He...The doctors say he'll never wake up, but we heard that you were doing ground breaking work here and..."

"I'm sorry, Sir," the girl said, her words smacking of a pre-scripted, polite rejection speech. "We only take patients with a referral. You'd have to speak to your family doctor." She picked up a brochure from her desk and handed it to Muldoon. "This leaflet contains details of all our services, Mr Erickson. If you talk these over with your doctor and discuss the possibilities of a referral. I'm afraid that most insurance carriers don't cover services such as ours; this means that those services will be rather expensive. We do hope that the patient..."

Skellan made a sudden lunge across the desk and seized the girl by the lapels of her revealing, faux-clinical blouse.

"Madam!" the girl exclaimed, reaching underneath the desk.

"My son!" Skellan screamed, and Muldoon himself almost wept at her heartbreaking tone. She reached into her jacket and waved a photograph of a happily grinning five-year old under the girl's nose. "He's not 'the patient'! His name is Peter! He loves trains!"

A door burst open and three serious looking men stepped through. The smallest of them – who was six feet tall – approached and gently propelled Skellan back towards Muldoon. He took his cue and held her gently by the shoulders.

"My son..." she sobbed.

"I'm sorry, Sir," the man said, his two associates hovering just out of Muldoon's field of vision. "I have to ask you to leave."

"My son!"

"Alright," Muldoon said, angrily. "Come on, darling."

They left, Skellan shuffling slowly, Muldoon shooting poisonous glances back over his shoulder. Once outside the building they went back down to their car and drove away.

"Who's Peter?" Muldoon asked.

"My nephew," Skellan replied. "Nice kid. Loves trains. He lives upstate with his parents."

*

"I've seen federal buildings that were less fortified," Muldoon said, talking to Sam and Barrett half-an-hour later. "Five cameras outside the door and three in the lobby, covering everything; no blind spots."

"There was no way to get further in unless someone let you through from the other side," Skellan added. "One door in the main area, one behind the desk; neither even had a handle on the outside."

"What about the receptionist?" Barrett asked.

"Shocked by my outburst, but not shaken," Skellan replied. "She tried to look scared afterwards, but she went straight for the alarm buzzer, cool as a cucumber. She was tensed for a fight, too; painted nails and naughty nurse-o-gram get-up notwithstanding, I wouldn't want to be the creep who tried to jump her in a dark alley."

"Intelligence services?"

"Probably. The military wouldn't give spec ops training to anyone that young."

"Those goons were pretty professional too," Muldoon went on. "Quick, efficient; showed up inside of ten seconds, but once they saw they weren't needed the bigger two backed off so we didn't feel pressured and do something stupid. The leader was all calm and rational; no physical contact once he'd removed the immediate threat to the receptionist. Pretty slick for rent-a-cops; bread-and-butter for any one of a dozen Federal agencies."

"What about the brochure?" Barrett asked.

"Flannel," Skellan assured him. "No details; a lot of subtle language that would make people wonder how safe this place really was. I'm betting no doctor ever refers anyone there; they just hand these things out to fob people off. We waited outside for two hours; no-one came in or went out through the visitors' entrance. There was no movement at _any_ of the windows either. I'd say that the place was basically deserted."

Sam lifted a device from Muldoon's kit bag. "What about the detector?"

"Well, if I was reading it correctly, then we were definitely detecting that neural energy beam," Muldoon replied. "I think it was coming from around the back somewhere."

"That clinches it then," Sam said. "That's where the dream chamber is."

"Then what about the insides?" Skellan asked.

Sam and Barrett shared a look, then Barrett unrolled a blueprint on the desk. "Fortunately the Committee were as cheap as ever," he explained. "They used a government contract to develop the building, then had it sold off to their operatives at a budget cost."

Muldoon looked doubtful. "And they left the blueprints here?"

"No; they tried to remove the blueprints. But that's the beautiful thing about the NID: We make so many copies of everything, to go to so many different bits of the bureaucracy, that it's almost impossible to actually destroy all traces of anything. There must have been five copies in this archive alone before they tried."

"I still don't know how you managed to find this copy?" Sam admitted.

"The NID isn't a trusting organisation," Barrett reminded her. "During my investigation of the Committee's activities, I learned where a lot of the bodies are buried. If I didn't need the information then and there I either left it where it was or hid it somewhere else, so I still have a few mass graves to turn over when I need to."

"So you're a ghoul?" Sam asked.

"I am not," Barrett protested proudly. He turned back to the blueprints. "I'm a spook."

"The difference being?"

"A spook is an internal security operative," Muldoon explained. "A ghoul searches graveyards and obituary columns to find identities for use by covert operatives."

"Excuse me?" Barrett asked, tapping a finger on the blueprint.

"Sorry, Agent Barrett," Muldoon said.

"Alright. Major Carter and I have been studying the blueprints. It's a small operation with only one real strong point; the basement lab. There isn't enough room on the lower floors for more than about ten staff; if we assume Dr Mason, a nurse and the receptionist, that leaves around seven guards."

Skellan looked at the blueprint. "What about the rest of the building?"

"Well, you didn't see anyone else in the building, but once we get through the main door to the basement we should be able to hold off an army."

"How do we get down into the basement?"

"It's a magnetic lock," Barrett explained. "If we have the power shut off at the grid the locks will open; basic fire safety. They'll have a back-up power supply in the lab, but it will take about thirty seconds to shunt the peripherals over to the generator. Should be a doddle."

"Well, doddle might be a strong term for it," Sam admitted.

Muldoon glanced at Skellan, who turned to Barrett. "Malcolm; we had a couple of questions for you before we do anything."

"Right."

"Firstly, do you want us along on the raid for this one?"

"Yes," Barrett said. "Yes, we do."

Skellan shot a look at Muldoon, who shrugged. "Secondly," she went on. "What's our backup?"

"Actually..." Sam coughed, awkwardly. "You'd be _our_ backup."

Skellan nodded. "This isn't what might be considered an _official_ operation, is it?"

"Not entirely," Barrett admitted.

"In fact, we're in a bit of a career-ending situation here, aren't we?"

"In effect, yes. Only Major Carter really has any kind of authorisation for this, and her CO can't actually authorise her to take action on US soil."

"So how do we get the power shut down?"

"Well, I'm writing this up as part of the clean-up on Operation Mole Hole," Barrett said. "It's a Committee operation, so technically that's true."

"Except that the President withdrew your carte blanche on Mole Hole last month," Muldoon noted.

"Yes; but only a few people know about that and I'm a good bluffer."

"Now I remember why I quit this kind of work," Sam muttered.

"So," Barrett said. "What are you saying, Skellan? That you're not with us? You and Muldoon are going to slope off back to Washington and leave a kid locked in a sensory deprivation tank, being used as a psychic weapon in the hands of..."

"No," Skellan assured him. "Just that this time you are going to have to owe _us_ ; big time." She stood up. "And one more thing," she added. "We're outnumbered and going up against professional leg-breakers; standard issue isn't going to cut it but I'm not happy capping off gangsta style against our own people."

Barrett looked to Sam and nodded.

"We concur," Sam said, lifting a bag onto the table. "On both counts."

*

Agent Cady sat at the reception desk, painting her nails with slow, even strokes. In the course of her career as a covert operative, she had developed the art of nail painting until she could have done it with her eyes closed, which was just as well as her duty was to keep her eyes on the monitors. The nail painting was merely a part of her cover; she had never done it until she started working in intelligence, but the CIA had felt that she would not be convincing in her undercover role as 'a woman' with plain fingernails. The NID concurred. Cady often wondered who it was that made policy decisions on undercover appearance, and why they could not recognise a woman if she was wearing anything more substantial than this joke of a nurse's uniform. Part of her had always been tempted to send a memo suggesting that agents disguised as 'a man' should wear tight t-shirts and leather pants, but she had known too many male agents to think that would really be desirable.

With great relief, Cady spotted a movement on the monitors. She reached down and picked up her radio.

"Front desk," she said. "Incoming on the main door. Looks like the nutty couple are back. I'll..." All of a sudden, the lights went out and the images vanished from the monitors. "Code citrus!" Cady snapped, drawing her firearm from under the desk. "Code...!"

The door burst open. Muldoon and Skellan leaped through, diving to the floor. Cady tracked Skellan with her pistol, judging her to be the greater threat. Then, with the roar of a powerful engine, a car rushed up to the front door, distracting Cady just long enough for Muldoon to raise his weapon and fire. Blue lightning arced around the agent's body and she fell heavily.

The car slewed to a halt and Sam and Barrett leaped out. Sam was on the near side; Barrett slid over the bonnet and followed Sam into the reception area.

"That was gratuitous," Skellan noted.

Barrett ignored her as he raced to the inner door. The three guards beyond were clearly unprepared for this attack, and fell easily. Muldoon and Skellan held their fire, allowing Sam and Barrett to deal with the guards. No-one was eager for any of the enemy to suffer a second zat blast.

"My god," Muldoon whispered, looking over the desk at the receptionist. A dark, purple stain was spreading over her chest. "She wasn't...human."

"That's not blood, Muldoon," Skellan told him. "It's nail varnish. Although you might be right; that shade..."

"If you're done with the fashion show," Barrett snapped, angrily, "You two watch this door. Major Carter?"

"Ready when you are."

 

Sam led the way down a short staircase. The power had not been interrupted here and with any luck the off-duty guards would not know that an incursion was in process. Sam and Barrett made directly for the area they had identified as a the locker room. They burst through the door and shot three more guards before they had time to react.

"That's six," Sam murmured. "That means..."

"Five more," Barrett said.

"You're sure?"

"Twelve labelled lockers," he pointed out. "Five more, including Mason and any technicians."

Sam nodded. "You're good," she allowed.

"Let's move," he suggested.

They encountered no more guards between the locker room and the heavy, steel door to the basement lab, but there they halted. The door was sunk a little below the level of the corridor, with three metal steps leading down to it. The door was made of steel, and secured from the inside with a heavy bolt.

"Damn!" Barrett snapped. "We're stuck."

"Ye of little faith," Sam chided. "Back off the steps."

Sam levelled her zat and fired three times. The blasts leaped from the door to the metal steps, and after a moment they were gone; disintegrated.

"Watch the door!" Sam ordered, leaping down to the opening and plunging through.

*

Skellan leaped over the receptionist's desk and took her seat. The monitors were coming back on line and she could see everything that was happening outside the building.

"No cameras inside," she told her partner. "Who knows what's happening in there."

"Anyone coming to investigate?" Muldoon asked.

"Lot of rubberneckers," Skellan replied. "No one official yet, thank God." She shook her head. "I just hope there's something incriminating down there or we're through."

"Nurses with guns," Muldoon noted. "Usually a sign of something suspect."

"That or one of your dodgy videos."

"Can't you ever let that lie? Those were part of a case."

"Oh dear," Skellan said.

"What is it?"

"Someone's coming. A man and a woman." Skellan dropped into a crouch behind the desk.

Muldoon hurried over to the side of the door. "Try not to fire that thing where people can see you through the door," he cautioned.

The newcomers entered the room; a lean, dark-haired man with the air of a hungry coyote and a young woman with bright, inquisitive eyes. Each wore a heavy metal cuff around their left arm.

Skellan raised her zat. "Alright! Hold it right there."

"Good afternoon," the man said. "We're looking for Major Carter."

*

Sam hit the floor of the laboratory rolling. There were three people inside – two women and one man – and Sam swept her zat across, blasting the young woman at the computers and the male nurse tending the isolation tank in quick succession. As she swung the weapon towards the other woman, the details of the room slowly began to penetrate from the level of instinctive reaction to conscious recognition.

The laboratory was quite small, and almost completely filled with the great bank of supercomputers and armoured sensory deprivation tank, with tubes and wires jutting out from both ends. From the sketches Janet had found, Sam recognised the dream chamber at once. A device like an electric chair stood at one end, presumably the protected interface. She also recognised Dr Cassidy Mason, architect of this insane project.

Something struck Sam in the arm, and she was suddenly aware of the tranquiliser gun in Dr Mason's hand. Sam squeezed the handle of her zat as she began to slump sideways, and the two women struck the floor together.

_*_

"Where is she?"

Sam stifled a sigh at Michelle's petulant demand. She was in the Cassasphere again. The scene around her was the basement lab, but subtle details were changed. Most notably the unconscious nurse and technician were not there; nor was Mason. If she was sharing the same dreamscape as her comrades, she could not see them.

Michelle was standing, hands on hips, glaring at Sam in anger. "She was supposed to come herself!"

"This is me, Cassidy," Sam said. "I'm not a puzzle-person. There are no puzzle people."

"Why is she sending you here?"

"Look!" Sam demanded. "If you can read me then look inside. Look _right_ inside."

"Tricks and..." Michelle broke off, her face twisting into a baffled frown. "That's isn't...There's so much," she breathed. "You are...I have never seen a game with so much scope."

The lab went up in flames. Heat washed over Sam; the dry, choking heat of the hell-moon, Netu. The world around her shifted as Michelle transformed the dreamscape to match Sam's memories. Then that backdrop was gone, and there was a desert; a castle; a ha'tak vessel. After a moment, Sam realised that Michelle had gone beyond her memories and was now digging through those of Jolinar.

"So many...So much," Michelle gasped. "How old are you?"

"Not so old," Sam replied. "I..."

"Michelle!"

Sam and Michelle turned to face Mason, who now stood alongside them, looking quite unlike the woman from the lab. Her face had fewer lines now, her figure was more trim, her brown hair was longer and hung loose down her back; she was wearing a slinky, red dress in place of her lab coat and she looked about ten years younger.

"Cassidy?" Michelle's frown deepened. "You...You're so pretty."

Mason looked taken aback by that. She looked down at herself, as though realising for the first time how she was dressed.

"Of course," Sam whispered. "You're dreaming. You've never let her see you like this before, have you Mason? I don't know how, but you must have shielded yourself to make sure that she could never read you." She wondered briefly what she looked like in this world of dreams, if Cassidy could appear no older than when she lost her fiancé, but she had no time to dwell on it.

"Be silent!" Mason's face was contorted by a cruel scowl. "Kill her, Michelle. Snuff out this pathetic game."

"But this is a good game," Michelle insisted. "There's so much to it. So many layers. So many challenges. I could spend weeks..."

"Kill her! That's the point of this game, you see. So much there, but you have to finish it fast; it's a real test of your skill."

Michelle did not look entirely convinced. "But Cassidy...?"

"Obey me, girl!"

Michelle looked shaken by her keeper's outburst. "Yes, Cassidy," she whispered.

"Are you sure?" Sam asked.

"She looks after me," Michelle replied. The world began to bend once more. "She knows what is best for me."

Sam shivered. The dreamscape was transforming into a setting that she recognised as the holding area in the SGC. That could only mean that Michelle was going to create the moment of Jolinar and Sam's greatest shared terror: The Tok'ra's death at the hands of the Ashrak. She forced herself to sound calm." I mean, are you sure that is Cassidy?"

Michelle looked quizzically at Sam.

"Michelle! Do as you are told!"

"Maybe she's part of the game."

Michelle turned and stared at Mason. "You're right," she realised. Then she clapped her hands, delightedly. "A new game!"

"No!" Mason snapped. "I forbid you to play me. Concentrate on Major Carter. Destroy her or I will be disappointed in you."

"I don't know. It's very confusing." Michelle stared at her feet for a long time, then she looked up again. "Oh well," she said, cheerfully. "I've got plenty of time."

"No...!" Mason took a step forward, but a moment later shackles had leaped from the air to bind her to the ground. Sam felt similar bonds wrap around her and hold her against a wall.

Michelle sat, and a chair rose up to receive her. "So," she mused. "Who do I trust? I do like this game."

*

Barrett saw a man emerge around the bend in the corridor and fired, but the zat blast seemed to disperse harmlessly around the man's body.

A voice called from further around the bend. "Agent Barrett!"

"Skellan?"

"It's alright, Sir; he's on our side."

After a tense moment, Barrett lowered his weapon. Skellan, Muldoon and the two newcomers approached and Barrett led them into the lab.

"Sam!" The dark-haired man dropped to his knees and reached out to wake her.

"Leave her," the girl said. "You might harm her if you snap her out of this."

"Skellan?" Barrett asked.

"General Hammond has sent some men to secure the building," she replied. "These two are some kind of technical specialists." She shook her head. "I don't know where from, but the man looks very familiar."

"I don't like them just showing up like this," Barrett said. "This was our operation."

Muldoon glowered at Barrett. "Sucks, don't it."

"It's not the same...Never mind."

"This is fascinating," the young woman said, studying the dream chamber.

"Excuse my asking," Barrett said. "But just who are you?"

"I'm Gersemi," she replied. "This is Chris Newman."

Newman sighed. "Ger..."

Barrett's eyes widened in recognition.

*

"Let go of me, Michelle!" Mason demanded. "Release me at once! I raised you! I have cared for you."

"Cassidy raised me," Michelle replied, lightly. "You're not real."

"I am real!"

Sam forced herself to remain calm, even as the binding cables bit into her dream-flesh. They came from another memory of Jolinar's, she realised; not a very pleasant one, either. "What are you so scared of, Cassidy?" Sam asked. "Why don't you ask her, Michelle?"

"Shut up! Michelle; you _must_ obey me! I created you! I gave you the power to control dreams, now I demand that you use that power and _kill_ this woman. Crush her! Strike her down with all of that power and destroy her!"

"What?" Michelle was visibly shocked. "Cassidy...I mean..."

"Do it! Do it you stupid girl, or I'll throw you back to the nothingness that was you life before this. You'll be nothing again; just a vegetable in a hospital bed, living in other people's dreams until the last neuron finally gives up the ghost!"

Michelle began to cry.

"That's not a nice thing to say," Sam told Mason. She held in check the response she wanted to give; that was not very nice either.

"Bad things happen to bad girls, Michelle," Cassidy warned.

"And isn't it bad to kill a real person?" Sam asked.

"Of course," Michelle said.

Cassidy snarled in anger. "But she's not real!"

Sam smiled confidently, although she was anything but confident. "Oh no?" she asked. She took a deep breath to steady herself, then focused on the bonds. For a moment they resisted her will, but then they melted away to nothing. "Only real people can make believe," she reminded Michelle.

Michelle gasped. "But I could have sworn..."

"No!" Mason insisted. "It's not possible."

"Michelle isn't the only one who's been practicing," Sam told Mason. "I've been studying lucid dreaming techniques since our last encounter." She looked at the psychologist, twisting impotently in her bonds. "In all the time you've been researching the chamber, sending Michelle into other people's dreams, did you ever bother to try and control your own?"

"So... _You're_ not real!" Michelle realised, pointing at Mason.

"No!" Mason shrieked.

"She _is_ real," Sam assured Michelle. "So are all the people in the games you've played."

"No," Michelle argued, but she sounded less sure of herself.

"I'm sorry, Honey; it's true. Take a look," she suggested. "See what it is that Dr Mason is so frightened of."

"No, Michelle," Mason said, her voice trembling. "I forbid it."

"You're scared because...Because I'm stronger than you," Michelle realised. "You can't control me while you're in here, and you're afraid I'll realise that..." Her voice tailed off and she looked ill. "Oh God," she whispered. "What have I done."

Sam put an arm around the girl's shoulders. "Michelle..."

Michelle pulled away. "She knows that if I trap her here, her body will eventually die," she whispered. "Like the others. I've held people here until they've vanished. I just thought the game was over...but they died. Didn't they? I...What did you make me do?" she demanded of Mason.

"I looked after you," Mason whispered.

"What did you make me do!"

The bonds vanished, but an invisible force lifted Mason and slammed her into a wall. The world bent once more, and now they stood in the living room of a small cabin.

Mason whimpered. "Oh no. Please, no."

 

*

 

Teal'c sat up in his hospital bed. The nurse who was checking his charts dropped her clipboard in alarm.

"Where am I?" Teal'c demanded.

"A-Andrew's Air Force Base," the nurse replied. "Are you alright, Sir?"

"Where is Major Carter?"

"I don't know. I'll...I'll fetch someone."

 

*

 

"You used me," Michelle said, continuing to read from Mason's sleeping mind. "You found a way to spy on other people's dreams, but it wasn't enough. You needed someone stronger than you. Someone who already possessed" – she paused, trying to decipher the language she was receiving – "the psychic potential to exploit the Mason phenomenon. And you found me."

"Yes."

"Tell me."

"You can see..."

"Tell me!"

 

*

 

General Hammond was passing the infirmary when he heard a crash. He hurried inside and saw that Colonel O'Neill had fallen from his bed. Hammond's initial wave of concern was overwhelmed by relief when he saw that Jack was struggling to his feet, wide awake and fighting to get free of a sheet and a drip stand.

 

*

 

"I found a story about a girl, in the newspapers. She was six years old and in a persistent vegetative state after a car accident. Her parents were refusing to cut off life support because there were occasional, anomalous bursts of brain activity and because other patients in the hospital – patients who had never met or seen the girl – were dreaming about her. I interviewed people who had known her and I realised I had my subject; extraordinary insight, empathy, prodigal intellect, excess of energy, highly emotional. All the classic hallmarks of a psychic child."

"So you stole her," Sam accused.

"I bought her fair and square, and for a bargain price," Mason said, spitefully. "The parents were glad to be rid of the financial burden; the hospital needed the bed space. No-one but me wanted her anymore; she was perfect in every way."

Tears welled in Michelle's eyes. "You...You said you knew my parents. You told me you sat by my bedside every Wednesday night, until you thought of the dream chamber as a way to bring me back to life. You told me how you'd read me stories and brush my hair. You said you did all this because you loved me."

"I haven't loved anyone in a long time, Michelle," Mason replied. "But I _did_ give you your life back. You were a cabbage with limbs when I found you; I made you a power."

"You made me a...weapon. They funded your research because you promised them a gun that couldn't be traced. An assassin that could reach out and destroy any enemy without ever leaving the lab."

Sam was glad she had left her physical body on the laboratory floor; if she had still been in it, she would have vomited. "God; how could you do that to a child?"

"I needed the money for my research."

"Research into what?"

"She wanted to contact the dead," Michelle said.

"To speak with your fiancé?"

"To bring him back," Mason corrected.

 

*

 

Jonas' eyes flickered open and he stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling. He took stock, and realised that he was in a bed that he did not know. "What happened?" he wondered aloud.

"You're awake!"

"Dr Giles?" He turned and saw her sitting beside the bed.

"Terry," she corrected again.

She smiled at his evident confusion. "We were pretty worried there for a moment," she admitted. "Janet's going through the files. I'll let her know you're alright."

 

*

 

"What?" Sam demanded.

"I'm nothing without him. I had to bring him back."

Michelle suddenly looked horrified, instead of angry. "She thought...She thought that she could use me to drag her husband out of some...collective unconscious and into her mind. She thought then he'd be with her forever. She's completely insane."

"Insane!" Mason shrieked. "You stupid child. You owe _everything_ to me. You are my creation and I will not brook such insolence. Don't cross me, Michelle."

"And that's not even my real name," Michelle realised, her anger rising again. "You renamed me after him. What...What was I called before?"

Mason shrugged. "I can't remember. Why should I care? What you were is meaningless. I remade you; nothing else matters."

"You made me."

"Yes!"

"You made me a _killer_!"

"Yes!"

"So be it."

A chill ran down Sam's spine. "No, Michelle," she whispered. "Don't do it."

"You made me a killer," Michelle said again. "You made me to do _this_!"

Plates flew from the shelves of the sideboard, clashing together, shattering into shards of razor sharp china. The fragments tumbled through the air towards Mason like a storm of knives.

"No!" Sam cried, throwing herself in front of the insane scientist.

The shards swerved around Sam's body as though they had a mind of their own, and she heard a scream from behind her. She turned and saw Mason staggering, blood flowing from a hundred cuts in her face and body.

"This doesn't concern you," Michelle told Sam. "You can go back. This is between Cassidy and I. And him."

The dreamscape rippled, and a figure appeared. It was a man, but all of him was grey. His jacket was grey, his hair was grey and his eyes were grey; his skin and clothes were grey. His face was free from expression, and his eyes glittered coldly when they looked on Mason.

"Mike," Mason whispered. She fell heavily to her knees and raised her hands, imploringly. "Help me, please."

"I am not here to help you, Cassidy," Michael said, his voice a dry whisper like the rustle of autumn leaves. "I am here to see you punished. Do you remember when last we were in this cabin? You threw things at me then; now it is my turn."

"Michael, please?"

"Michelle," Sam whispered, taking the girl by the arm. "Stop this."

"I'm not really doing anything," Michelle replied. "This is her doing."

"Please, stop it."

"I thought I told you to go? Nothing is holding you, Sam. You can leave."

"I'm not leaving you," Sam insisted. Aside from her innate stubbornness, she was unsure she could leave while she remained under the effect of Mason's tranquiliser.

The grey man, Michael, grabbed hold of a chair and swung it at Mason. The wooden limbs cracked when they hit her body, splinters digging into her skin and the force of the blow knocking her flat on her back. Sam was appalled by the stark, brutal violence of the action. If this _was_ a figment of Mason's imagination given form, then she must have been unusually well-acquainted with the nature of such conflict. There was nothing fantastic, nothing cartoonish; just the harsh, sudden cruelty of domestic violence.

"Please, Michael," Mason wailed. "Please, baby. I'm sorry!"

"Make it stop," Sam begged.

"She wants this," Michelle insisted. "She wants to be punished for killing her fiancé."

"But she didn't kill him!"

"She threw him out of the cottage. She had concocted a paranoid suspicion that he was having an affair with her best friend. They fought, he left; she never saw him alive again."

"It wasn't her fault!"

"She believes that it was."

The dreamscape shifted, Sam and Michelle floating like spectral observers over the floor and through the wall as Michael dragged Mason out of the door, into the pouring rain. He ignored her cries as he hauled her through the puddles to his car!

"He's going to kill her!" Sam screamed.

Mason turned her bloody face towards the sound. "Michelle!" she cried, stretching out her hand toward them. "Please! Have mercy!"

"Ignore the screams," Michelle said, her voice choked with tears. "'It's just part of the game. It a trick to make you let go; make you lose. Don't let them trick you, Michelle'. You taught me well, Cassidy."

"Michelle, stop it!" Sam grabbed the girl by the arm. "You _know_ this is wrong, Cassidy. You _know_ this is no game. Don't do this, Michelle. Don't do it to yourself! Don't become a murderer."

"I'm already a murderer!" Michelle sobbed. "She made me a killer long ago."

"No!" Sam protested. "You were a child; you didn't know anything but to believe her. You're not a murderer, Michelle, but if you do this – if you knowingly and deliberately take a life – then you _will_ be a killer." She seized Michelle by both shoulders and turned the girl to face her. "And it won't be because she made you one, Michelle. You'll be a killer by your own act."

"She's made me kill."

"Listen to her," Sam whispered. "Look at her. Read how much she's suffered. She doesn't need more punishment; she needs help." She managed to say the last without choking on her own hypocrisy. Had she entered the lab with a pistol in her hand she might have shrunk from gunning down Mason's assistants, but not from putting a bullet in the mad woman who had stolen Michelle's childhood.

Michelle smiled, sadly. "You wouldn't have done it," she whispered.

The world went quiet. The screams, the lashing rain and the horrid slap of flesh on flesh had all ceased. The silence was broken only by the softest of sobs. Sam turned her head and saw Mason, huddled in a shivering ball but quite uninjured.

"Thank you," Sam said.

"I won't kill her," Michelle said. "You're right; she needs help." She gently removed Sam's hands from her shoulders and walked over to Mason's side.

"What are you going to do?"

"Use what she has given me," Michelle explained. "I'm going to take the bad things away."

"Michelle."

The girl turned her back on Sam and crouched beside Mason. Slowly, gently, she coaxed her erstwhile guardian to raise her head, leaned close and kissed her on the forehead. "I forgive you," she whispered.

Sam was forced to turn her face away as a brilliant light ignited between them, and the two women burned with silver flame.

 

*

 

With a groan, Sam came to her senses, lying in the middle of the laboratory floor.

"Welcome back," Gersemi said. "If you feel a little woozy that's just the anti-toxins and stimulants I gave you to bring you round. I think you might be needed." The young engineer stood aside, allowing Sam to see Barrett and Newman staring daggers at each other across drawn energy weapons.

Sam groaned. "Would you have a look at the girl in the tank?" she asked, dragging herself stiffly to her feet.

Gersemi nodded.

"Okay, boys; put the guns down," Sam said.

"This man is a traitor and a wanted criminal," Barrett said.

"And what's your excuse, Chris?"

"He threw down on me," Newman replied. "Do I need anything else?"

Sam shook her head, wearily. "Boys," she muttered. "Malcolm; Chris Newman is a flight lieutenant in the Asgard fleet and you can't arrest him because he's dead. Chris; Malcolm Barrett is an agent with the NID."

"So you _want_ me to shoot him?"

"No. He's okay, really. Please don't shoot him."

Newman lowered his arm. "Alright," he agreed. "Since you asked nicely."

"Malcolm?"

After a long moment, Barrett let the zat'nik'tel close. "Skellan and Muldoon went to talk to the reinforcements," he added, as though he had not just been pointing a weapon at an allied pilot. "I think they've decided to put in an early claim for the credit on this one."

"Let them have it," Sam suggested. "They've earned it."

"Sam!" Gersemi called.

"Yes?"

"There's someone in here. She's in a deep, drugged sleep..."

"Don't you mean a coma?" Sam asked.

"No. Definitely asleep, and probably only that because of the drugs. She's in a terrible state though; muscles wasted, sense organs atrophied, skin fragile. Her organs are almost redundant; utterly dependent on the machines..."

"So...That's it. This damned machine really has brought her mind back from the brink, but it's left her in no state to ever be woken up?"

"No," Gersemi replied. "Yes; if we removed her from the chamber now he would die, but don't worry. I can't help her here, but I can rewire this chamber to a portable power unit and take her back to the ship."

"Ship?"

"Yes; we brought a Valkyrie."

"An Asgard rescue and medical ship," Newman explained. "We can treat her there. Well...Ger can; I can watch and point and say 'hmm'."

"What about Dr Mason?" Barrett asked, crouching beside the woman. He touched her throat, checking for a pulse, and she groaned.

"She's alive," Sam breathed, gratefully.

"Where am I?" Mason asked, blearily. Sam could not help being struck by a change in her voice: The bitterness was gone from her tone, replaced by fear and sadness and uncertainty; there was something almost childish in her tone.

Barrett looked questioningly at Sam.

"What do you remember?" Sam asked.

"Mike!" Mason wailed. "He's...he's..." Tears glistened in her eyes.

Sam knelt beside Barrett and tentatively put her arms around Mason. "It's okay," she whispered, as the mad scientist clung to her desperately, shivering with suppressed sobs. "Let it out." Sam looked up at Barrett. "Would you call Janet, please," she asked. "Get her to tell Dr Giles what's happened here – well, some of it anyway – and ask if she'll come out here. I think Dr Mason is going to need a friend."

"What's happened to her?" Barrett asked, bluntly. Fortunately, Mason seemed too distraught to notice.

"Michelle took all her 'bad things' away," Sam replied. "I guess there was a lot of bad."

 

*

 

_One month later_

 

Sam stood at the foot of the embarkation ramp, waiting with her heart in her mouth. The event horizon rippled and two figures emerged, Gersemi and one of her sisters. Sam kept waiting, and waiting, and after a moment the wormhole collapsed.

"Sam?"

Sam looked at Gersemi's sister. She was probably about sixteen, blonde, with bronzed skin, an athlete's graceful strength and sparkling green eyes. She wore a long dress, identical in cut to Gersemi's, but white instead of dark blue.

"Michelle?" Sam asked, astonished. "You've...grown."

"My mental self-image was arrested at the time of my original accident," Michelle explained, then looked at Gersemi to see if she had got it right; Gersemi nodded, with a proud smile, and Michelle grinned.

"You look good," Sam said. "You look great."

Michelle grinned again. "So do you," she replied. "You're even prettier real."

Sam blushed, and realised that she was standing quite awkwardly, several feet from a girl who looked just as nervous as Sam herself felt. She opened her arms, and Michelle ran into them, hugging her tightly, revelling in the sheer human contact after her life of isolation. Sam still felt a little awkward; she had been expecting a little girl; not a teenager who was as tall as she was.

"She should be fine now," Gersemi told Sam. "We've repaired her failing organs, restored her pigment, repaired her musculature..."

"And improved on it, seemingly," Sam noted.

"Not really." Gersemi walked up and laid her hand on the Michelle's shoulder. "She's just so eager to do things. It's all we can do to keep her still, sometimes. That's why we need to bring her back here; the _Stupid Idea_ just isn't big enough. We're worried that she'll break something."

"Ger!" Michelle wailed, mortally embarrassed. "I wanted to come back," she told Sam. "I want to see the world I never got a chance to see. And I wanted to see you again."

"Okay," Sam said. "So, what...?"

"Everything!"

"Well, that's a tall order," Sam laughed.

"Well, first...I still can't remember what I'm really called," Michelle admitted.

Sam nodded. They had found the answer in Mason's files after Gersemi had taken Michelle away on the Valkyrie. "Your name was..."

Michelle lifted her hand and laid it over Sam's mouth. "Don't," she said. "They gave me up; I don't want to be a burden on them and so I don't want to remember them. I...I..." She blushed bright red and averted her eyes.

"What?" Sam asked.

Michelle looked imploringly at Gersemi.

"She wants to be called Michelle Carter," Gersemi explained.

Sam smiled, fondly. "Well, I think that can be arranged," she promised.


End file.
